However, I don’t understand how what you are saying singles out Mormonism. I see why it applies to Mormonism. It seems to apply equally to almost any historical text. If the Book of Mormon has value because it’s antiquated ethics cause you to question your own, shouldn’t this apply equally to most any historical text?
If all you had was the Book of Mormon as guidance and not post-modern philosophy as well, I wonder if it ever would have caused you to question your values at all. If causing you to question yourself is what makes the Book of Mormon valuable, shouldn’t authors like Derrida be far more valuable for their having directly proposed this approach? Why bring the Book of Mormon into this at all, other than as one particular example among many? Why give Mormonism credit for something you learned via Derrida?

For a brief while after leaving Mormonism I became a Baha’i. While I no longer am one, I still feel an affinity for many of it’s teachings.
One thing in particular that was able to radically change my perception on religion in general is that we can expect more out of religion.
This faith began around the same time as Mormonism, in a culture far more oppressive, yet from the beginning they taught gender, racial and economic equality as well as independent investigation of the truth.
From this I learned that it isn’t unreasonable to expect Prophets to actually behave like Prophets. To rise above their culture and teach values which many cultures won’t arrive at for more than one hundred years. Rather than lag behind culture, playing catch up only decades later.

I think viewing religious texts as separate from cultural texts is part of the problem. Religion is an aspect of culture. When you adopt a religion you’re not just adopting beliefs but certain practices and a community. LDS has its own perspective which is different as a whole, and also varying from individuals within the group, from that of other cultures.

When we see religion as a part of culture we see religious fundamentalism as a type of ethnocentrism. If we are serious with ourselves about finding truth then we must remove those blinders of superiority and admit that we do not have a monopoly on it. There is much truth within the Book of Mormon, but there is also a lot of rubbish (as Ashley pointed out in the beginning of this post). It’s the same for all sacred texts.

To put it in a slightly nerdier way, I like to think of absolute truth as a light spectrum too broad for humans to see with the limits of our biology. Throughout history, wise people in various cultures have acted like a prism, relaying certain wavelengths of that spectrum to their people, but failing to record the whole thing. Quite rapidly that bit of truth gets muddied with non-truths. In order for anyone to catch a glimpse of that full light spectrum they’ll need to unearth the truths buried in various cultures to piece it all together.

First of all, what makes the study of LDS scripture different from studying any significant cultural text? If their value lies in their ability to cause us to doubt ourselves, shouldn’t any set of cultural wisdom be able to do the same thing?

Secondly, the theme of this post is distinctly Mormon (congratulations) in that it values the progression of the individual above all else. But what about the cases in which that is not the most important? This perspective implicitly relies on a belief that the world will eventually come to ruin, which is all part of a plan in which individual progression is paramount. If we’re trying to save this planet instead of ourselves against inevitable destruction, doesn’t the emphasis change a bit? To give an example, should we allow everyone to gain their own personal testimony that genocide is bad, or are there some bits of morality that are better programmed into people?

I recently had an interaction with an organization that is somewhat of a derivative of the Church: Arbinger Institute. When I tried to bring up the deceptiveness of the Church, Arbinger rebuffed me firmly, saying that their rule was to only look at one’s own self-deception, and to never consider another’s or an organization’s, since this would be placing blame, and was not useful.

The problem I have with Arbinger’s policy is that, in my own process, being able to identity the Church’s deceptiveness helped me to see my own. If that view is blocked, I may never be able to accurately see myself.

I meant “quiet”. Please change that. It’s late.

Amen.

I am admittedly ignorant of Mormonism so much of my understanding of the references in this article come from the infallibility of Wikipedia. I will take your word Ash that the book is quite progressive and that searching for racist passages online was not the best thing for me to do. Coming into awareness of them for the first time, without being conditioned to accept them as sacred, was a bit too much for me to handle. I took some quite personally.

That aside, this article was mind-blowing. They always are. It seems unnecessary to say that anymore, but I will because it’s only right to recognize it. I believe that all good Christians have undergone the same process of being unthinking followers, to atheists, to agnostics.

I might add that If there is truth beyond culture then a culture can be held up against truth and shown to have repugnant beliefs. I don’t believe such things are dependent upon the passage of time. The impossible part is finding an observer who can decipher truth by having no personal stake in culture. Perhaps this is what time is finally starting to do to us through multiculturalism.

In Arizona there is a Hopi petroglyph known as Prophecy Rock which tells of a time when humankind was given the gift of spirituality. The white man perverted that gift and lead the world down a path of materialism and technological hubris. That path abruptly ends when their heads become detached from their hearts and they create their own extinction event in fire. The second path is one in which we live on, connected to the earth through our minds and hearts. What liberals often define as truth is merely the quite peace that comes from silencing the rest of themselves. The truth is never so reassuring, and thoughts do not always make you thoughtful.

In Western culture (and by that I more accurately mean white culture) we place a great deal of emphasis on cognitive intelligence while dismissing other forms of intelligence as being of lesser importance. We have this horrible view that the brain is somehow separate from the body - compartmentalizing not just the outside world, but our own selves to the point where we have internal conflicts amongst created departments battling for dominance rather than true internal harmony.

I see that it is not just Mormonism which calls for restoration and a paradoxical salvation from those it considers primitive, but White culture as a whole. For hundreds of years, individual whites living under the command of empire have sought the “ancient secrets” of brown people to save them (from Orientalism, to the hippies, and more recently hip-hop). Perhaps because in order for authoritarianism to exist, the people who benefit from the savagery of the institution must willingly abandon their hearts and souls for an unemotional intelligence if they are to accept their situation.

Christianity itself, a Middle-Eastern/Mediterranean religion, is essentially a salvation philosophy set against the tyranny of empire. It could have been another case of brown people saving white people as it spread through Europe, yet was used to justify the subjugation of Others under European empires.

If there is a God, his solution to most everything is diversity. That is the nature of nature. The monoculture of authoritarianism breeds a diversity of resistance. While Mormon missionaries may be conditioned corporate soldiers sent to save the rest of the world, more good may come should they allow the brown people they’re sent to save teach them something about restoration. There is truth to be found everywhere and such opportunities to find those truths are being squandered by Restoration when they could be seized by restoration-ing. Truth is truth and false dichotomies are constructed by institutions.

I have had some discussion with a co-worker who was raised by atheist parents and have found myself feeling quite envious of the idea of being raised with a “clean slate” so to speak. My sister and I have discussed how nice it would be to rid our minds of the programming of the religion we were raised in.

This is the format in which my wife and I raised our children from birth. Gifts from relatives were laundered, all religious references were removed. One year they got “Noah’s Ark”, a bathtub toy. It became “The Animal Boat”. Noah and Mrs. Noah were re-christened (lol) with the names of our kids.

Overall it worked well, but there are some drawbacks. They’re illiterate in a certain specific way. Western literature is full of vague references to stories from Biblical mythology, and this is perfectly foreign to them both. Imagine trying to explain titles like *East of Eden*, for example. That’s what I find myself doing more and more often as they slouch toward high school…

Best,

G

Lately I have had some discussion with a co-worker who was raised by atheist parents and have found myself feeling quite envious of the idea of being raised with a “clean slate” so to speak. My sister and I have discussed how nice it would be to rid our minds of the programming of the religion we were raised in. But this is a new perspective I hadn’t considered yet… To be able to see value in the process of seeking for truth in the world and within… Perhaps their is some value in suffering for truth, in feeling the excruciating loss of certainty and plunging into the unknown and waiting to see what the world has to offer when we stop trying to make it fit inside one narrow world view.

Have you heard of the novel “City of God” by E.L. Doctorow? It deals with this issue of leaving what you thought was true to pursue “real” truth and it’s amazing.

While reading, “The authoritarian move of drawing a line is actually a most fertile subversive act, containing in it all the questions the line was supposed to stop people from asking,” I couldn’t help but relate your thoughts to the situation of being placed in a idyllic garden where one is given an “authoritarian” line in which the crossing risks outright disobedience and expulsion. Of course crossing this line is our ticket to true knowledge. Thus, the tension is established for us in the beginning. And many in the church seem to still be in the garden not realizing that the the whole point is to partake of the fruit.

I think that there is a Renaissance coming to Mormonism or it will collapse under the weight of its own dogmatism.